Tracking Lightning Through 3D Thunder Source Location With Distributed Acoustic Sensing

Abstract Investigating lightning is of key significance in understanding the lightning mechanism and mitigating lightning hazards. We reported an experiment of investigating lightning through three‐dimensional (3D) thunder locating using a Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) array in Hefei, China. In this experiment, we recast a 7.7 km long urban telecom optical fiber cable as 3,850 sensors using the DAS technique. From dense DAS recording, we manually identified 101 thunder events during six positive cloud‐to‐ground (CG) lightning flashes within 20 min. The DAS recorded thunder signals are dominated by direct acoustic waves rather than air‐ground coupled surface waves. The thunder events were then located using the arrival times of thunder signals. The locations and amplitudes of thunder events are generally consistent with those from the conventional lightning detection data set and broadband magnetic field. There is likely a correlation between the maximum strength of thunder events and the highest peak current for individual CG flashes. Moreover, the comparison with weather radar observations indicates that lightning usually originated from areas of high reflectivity (e.g., ≥50dBz) with diffusely distributed (from ground surface to ∼5 km altitude) thunder events and extended in a narrow altitude range of 3–5 km to areas with low radar reflectivity.